Providing efficient customer service is crucial for the success of large retail chains, such as Best Buy, Sears, Wal-Mart, and others. Retail chains customarily hire associates to cruise through the aisles of their stores and look for customers that need help. In turn, customers in need of assistance, conventionally stay in the aisles and wait for the nearest associate to come and help them. When it takes too long for an associate to arrive, some customers become frustrated and leave, thereby costing the store a loss of a potential sale. To prevent such a scenario from happening, stores are forced to make available on the store floor a significant number of associates, which is very costly.
Additionally, customers demand well-informed store associates who are capable of answering a variety of questions about store merchandise. When store associates fail to answer a customer question, or take too long to obtain the answer, some customers become frustrated and decide against buying from the store. For this reason, stores dedicate significant resources to employee training. Despite such expenditures, however, employee training remains a daunting task. The large number of associates to be trained and the high turnover rates among the associates hinder the efforts of retail chains and increase their employee training expenses.
Therefore a need exists for an improved way of providing customer service that is both efficient and less costly.